Association for Psychiatry, Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics (DGPPN) is one of the annual highlights for scientists, doctors and therapists. Each year more than 10,000 participants meet at the end of November in Berlin, making the Congress Europe’s largest scientific meeting in the field of mental disorders. This year the DGPPN is emphasising a highly topical theme, “The challenge of demographic change”.

The ongoing social change in industrial countries is affecting the expectations and demands related to the diagnosis, treatment and care of mental illnesses. Although increasing life expectancy is associated with a gain in healthy life years, it is also accompanied by an increase in illnesses of older age, such as dementias, age-related depression, age-related psychoses and anxiety disorders. Many older people with mental illnesses have comorbid somatic diseases and live in difficult social conditions. Consequently, age-sensitive drugs, psychotherapeutic and psychosocial treatment procedures and lowthreshold, cross-sectoral care offerings need to be increasingly developed and expanded.

At the same time, middle-aged people are under increasing pressure because they carry the rising costs of the pension and health care systems. This constitutes an additional risk for inability to continue working or find employment because of mental illness must be countered through greater investments in prevention and early recognition and intervention. For the above reasons, “The challenge of demographic change” will be the thematic focus of the DGPPN Congress 2014.